This essay appeared originally as Lou Marinoff, “A Skeptical View of Sustainability,” Design a Pattern of Sustainable Growth. Innovation, Education, Energy and Environment, ed. Daniele Schilirò (Craiova: ASERS Publishing, 2014), 14–30, http://doi.org/10.14505/despag.2014.ch1.

It is republished here by permission of ASERS Publishing, Craiova, Romania.

Physical Entities and Systems

Dynamic change is manifest across the entire spectrum of existence. Even at the larger and smaller extremes of physical phenomena, nothing appears indefinitely sustainable. Our universe itself has a “life expectancy,” and so do its fundamental particles. Even that most humble and apparently stable of elementary entities, namely the proton, appears to admit of mortality. Economists study processes that unfold in the human world, which is incalculably less stable, and therefore far more unsustainable, than the cosmos and its building blocks. The purpose of this essay is to remind economists, among others who study or otherwise avail themselves of the notion of sustainable development, that “sustainability” is from the outset a time-dependent term, which unfolds only—if at all—in a correspondingly delimited temporal context. Thus, if any entity, phenomenon, or process attracts the descriptor “sustainable,” such a descriptor is meaningful only in a suitably delineated time-frame. Nothing is indefinitely sustainable, and everything that is sustainable is so only for a time. Therefore, to speak of sustainable development is to beg questions about corresponding time-scales.

We do not require modern physics to be made aware of the impermanence of things. We humans are cognizant of own mortality, of the fragility of our institutions, and of the inherent and apparently universal susceptibility of everything to change. It is not by accident that three of the most ancient and robust philosophical systems that entail Theories of Everything (TOEs), namely Taoism, Hinduism, and Buddhism, squarely confront and address matters pertaining to change.

Taoism observes that nothing is sustainable except for change itself; thus, its normative prescriptions are concerned not with attempting to prolong a given process indefinitely (a “fool’s errand”); rather, with endeavoring to identify and optimize desirable (rather than undesirable) possibilities entailed by cyclically changing circumstances.

Hindu cosmology similarly observes the cyclical nature of things, and so posits a “Trimurti” of three main sub-deities—Brahma, Vishnu, Shiva—who oversee, respective1y, the creation, sustenance, and dissolution of all phenomena, including the universe itself.